


50 sentences: fujicest

by cuvier (orphan_account)



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 13:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/cuvier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for a 1sentence challenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	50 sentences: fujicest

**01 AIR**

The autumn air is crisp, fresh on your tongue as you breathe, and it’s a perfect day for strolling, only you wish you’d brought your coat along; he notices you wrapping your arms around yourself, hands you his coat, tells you, “You look close to freezing, Yuuta”, and as you take the coat from him, you notice the goosebumps on his forearms instead.

**02 APPLES**

“Haven’t had apples in a long time,” you tell Yuuta, staring at the one in his hand, trying not to sound whiny because you know he hates it; he stares at you blankly, and you continue, “Became allergic to them in the US just a year ago, for some reason”, and he just nods and continues chewing, like he’s forgotten they’re your favourite fruit, and you think to yourself, time heals all wounds, but you haven’t done anything you like for a long time either.

**03 BEGINNING**

You shout across the courts, “It’s only just beginning”, even though the ball in your hand feels like it’s been made of lead; he grins and says, “Don’t worry, Yuuta”, and you serve like it’s your last.

**04 BUGS**

He holds the still, lifeless device in the palm of his outstretched hand, red light blinking, red alert; “You were listening in, weren’t you – ” he says, and you cut in, hands itching to make a sudden grab, “I didn’t mean it that way,” but he presses on, “ – to Mizuki-san and I, weren’t you,” and for once in your life, you have nothing to say.

**05 COFFEE**

“Surely there’s no need for such extravagance,” you say apologetically, staring down at the voucher in your hand – it’s for a famous coffee house in the region – and he frowns, scratches his head, mumbles, “But your birthday only comes once every four years,” a pause, and then he looks up, “and – I heard they make wasabi-flavoured coffee.”

**06 DARK**

When the two of you still shared rooms as children, you would pretend to be sound asleep until your mother turned out the lights, and then you would open your eyes again to watch him, wrap your arms around him, ruffle his short, cropped hair, always glad for the fact that he was a heavy sleeper.

**07 DESPAIR**

You taught him how to deal with sadness when he was six, spending afternoons after afternoons in the study writing away your childish worries in illegible scribbles, but nowadays, no matter how much you write “I wish he wouldn’t be so cold to me” and fold the paper into neat, square eighths, the thought stays in your system like an unwanted disease.

**08 DOORS**

“Sorry, but my girlfriend’s around – come back later, Yuuta,” Syuusuke tells you, and you only get a split second’s view of his disarranged clothes as he shuts the door in your face, while the only thought that races through your head is _but I thought he liked me best_.

**09 DRINK**

“Then you rinse the cups again before pouring the tea in,” you explain, your fingers coated messily with tea leaves; he laughs and asks you if Mizuki has been teaching the etiquette classes over at St. Rudolph, because you’ve gotten it all wrong – here, let me show you, and you think, _Stupid, stupid aniki_ , and let him.

**10 DUTY**

Yuuta hates it when Syuusuke writes everything off as brotherly duty – doing calculus homework for him, playing tennis and deliberately losing a set, staying up to chat until Yuuta finishes his term paper – he wants Syuusuke to know he’s not the child he used to be, and maybe, just maybe, he wants to know the truth.

**11 EARTH**

Your thumb moves over the line in the palm of his hand, the two of you still, just lying there, staring at the cotton candy clouds in uncomfortable silence, and then he mumbles, “Aniki, what will we do”, and you wish you could disappear off the face of the earth – you don’t have an answer.

**12 END**

“Do you believe in Armageddon,” Yuuta asked one day when they stood at the balcony after dinner, leaning on the railing with their backs turned to the ground so all they could see was the sky with their heads turned up, and Syuusuke said “maybe”, knowing it’d become a “yes” if Yuuta hated him forever.

**13 FALL**

Walking in the darkness is dangerous: you could skip a step and fall down the stairs and cut your head and bleed to death, but it can’t hurt more than you do now – he told you he hates you, he told you he hates how good you are, and he is always gone before you can tell him how you’d rather not have it at all if he hates you.

**14 FIRE**

On Christmas Eve you seated yourselves in front of the fireplace, sipping cocoa while your mother and sister busied themselves with the food, and you broke the silence, wanting this to be a happy Christmas, and asked, “What’s your favourite Christmas story, aniki”, watching his face light up.

**15 FLEXIBLE**

“I’ve got practice on Wednesday too,” Yuuta says as dully as he can, not wanting to encourage Syuusuke any further, but Syuusuke only leans across the table, clasping Yuuta’s hands in his own before Yuuta can even move an inch backwards and says, “What about Friday? My schedule’s flexible.”

**16 FLYING**

On the night flight to Hong Kong it rained torrents, leaving everyone asleep in their seats, snuggled warm under the in-flight blankets except for the two of you, scared of falling asleep on each others’ shoulders and not knowing what to say when the sunlight wakes you up the next morning.

**17 FOOD**

Maybe it’s the overdose on pumpkin curry that makes Yuuta talk, or maybe it’s just the lack of company amongst aged relatives, but they’ve never had a conversation as easy as this before, talking about everything under the sun across the dining table, and suddenly Yuuta realises that it’s been for so long that they’ve had a proper meal together.

**18 FOOT**

Set another foot out of this door and you’re away from this place forever, you and your little suitcase with those photographs you’re going to burn _someday_ – there’s no point in staying if all you can do is sit and stare at each other from across the room, always waiting for the other to say something you know you never can.

**19 GRAVE**

At their mother’s funeral Syuusuke doesn’t cry, but stands still in front of the gravestone with his hands clasped so tightly the knuckles threaten to slice his skin, but when they get home he locks himself in his room, and Yuuta can’t even bring himself to knock on the door and ask if he’s fine.

**20 GREEN**

The sea is almost emerald-green as you sit on the beach and wait for the sand to seep in between your toes, watching Yuuta swim against the waves, trying to bake his skin gold (no, he’s not waving to you, it’s a backstroke), imagining how it would be like to jump into the water with your shirt still on – you know it’ll drag you down but at least it’ll clean the dirt from underneath your skin.

**21 HEAD**

By the time you’re both eighteen you’re already a head taller than he is, and your aunts and uncles hug you with surprising ferocity and pat you on the back when visiting, saying, “Oh, but how quickly you’ve grown, Yuuta”, and you keep your mouth shut, not wanting to say anything, not when he sits himself in a corner, smiling like he’s happy about that when he really isn’t.

**22 HOLLOW**

Ten years down the road and Syuusuke’s become different – he still looks like a child grown up too fast, but gives you now-hollow smiles in return for your ‘hello’s and ‘how are you’s (you don’t know how but at least you still try), and it makes you want to strangle the truth out of him when he says everything’s fine.

**23 HONOUR**

“Swear it on your scout’s honour,” Yuuta grumbles, “that you won’t go around freaking my friends out with some, oh, weird trick of yours ever again,” and Syuusuke agrees, because firstly, he’s not a scout and he doesn’t know about scout’s honours, and secondly, it’s because Yuuta said so.

**24 HOPE**

Aniki’s voice is muffled over the phone, fuzzy around the edges; you say, “Sorry?” – too busy listening to pay attention to what he’s saying – and he says, words rushed, breath short, “I was just saying, if you ever wanted to come back to Seigaku – ” and you say, “No”, just a little too quickly, a little too harshly, and in the subsequent, consequent silence another “sorry” threatens to spill past your lips.

**25 LIGHT**

It’s midnight on the train to nowhere with Yuuta’s head on your shoulder – you stay awake like the neon lights of the city (a million tiny stars through the glass windowpanes) so at least you know when to alight – and when you yawn you try not to shift so he doesn’t wake up.

**26 LOST**

Yuuta remembers the feeling of clutching onto Syuusuke’s shirt in his hands, the fabric rough against his skin, remembers how his heart would thud and slow down again when Syuusuke tells him that they’ll find a way out of here, but now that he’s older he’s got no more excuses to want to lose himself again.

**27 METAL**

He tiptoes, kisses you with his eyes closed so all you see are his eyelashes, bites down on your lip so all you taste is the foreign, metallic tang of blood on your tongue – _the blood that flows through both your veins_ , you think, panicking, but your arms just won’t move and you just can’t push him away.

**28 NEW**

Yuuta will never forget the fresh, cold fear of being a first-year in Seigaku, will never forget being new and strange and gossiped about, questioned, stared at, labelled as merely somebody’s little brother, but most of all he will never forget the fact that Syuusuke never tells him the truth just when it matters most.

**29 OLD**

He thrust a tattered shoebox into your hands the day he packed up for the new school year and scowled, “I don’t need these anymore”, and when you opened it you found the old photographs that you took of him some ten years ago with your first toy camera.

**30 PEACE**

The house becomes hauntingly quiet and empty after Yuuta leaves for St. Rudolph, and maybe it’s just you, because Yumiko smiles and says it’s good now that we all have more space to ourselves, and what are you fretting for, he’ll be back during summer vacation, won’t he, and you smile back weakly, but sometimes the urge to scream claws against your chest and gets a little hard to ignore.

**31 POISON**

“I love you,” you blurt out as you quarrel with Yuuta about something silly, but that something silly doesn’t matter anymore, because Yuuta’s grip on your shirt goes slack and he looks at you like you just said you laced his afternoon tea with arsenic – judging by the dull thudding in your chest, however, it feels like he’s been lacing your tea with arsenic instead.

**32 PRETTY**

They say the prettiest things are the most useless things, but Syuusuke is nowhere near useless; he is pretty, useful, useful and pretty, perfect student, perfect child, and he makes Yuuta feel like the odd one out, pretty useless, stick-out sore thumb, despite the fact that Yuuta is not pretty at all.

**33 RAIN**

His hand is warm in the cold as he holds onto your wrist as tightly as he can – you can feel bruises forming – and he says, “At least get an umbrella before you leave, Yuuta” while both of you stand, immovable, like wet, sopping morons, like being on oxygen masks, hardly daring to breathe in the suffocating rain, knowing time, for both of you, is running out.

**34 REGRET**

Then you finally lose it and start yelling the house down: “Yeah, yeah, so it’s my fault, everything’s my fault,” (“We didn’t mean it that way, Yuuta,” Yumiko insists, looking close to tears) and immediately regret it when you take one look in Syuusuke’s direction and find helplessness written all over his face.

**35 ROSES**

“You love me, you love me not,” you say deliberately, tongue-in-cheek, pulling out each and every petal with careless ease, showering Yuuta with them until he’s covered what must look like a hundred-acre rose garden, and you only stop when he puts down his homework and yells, “You know, if you wanted to know if I like you, you could just _ask_.”

**36 SECRET**

The next morning he corners you near the fridge just when you’re getting your orange juice, shirt unbuttoned just enough for you to see the hickey on his collarbone (you know he does it on purpose), murmurs, voice just loud enough so no one but you can hear him, “So how was last night for you, Yuuta,” and you make a mad dash for the bathroom before your mother can notice the tent in your pants – she mustn’t notice, and so mustn’t anyone else.

**37 SNAKES**

Yuuta has always believed that sticks and stones could break his bones, true, but when Syuusuke tells him he’s going away (“It’s not like I won’t be back, really”), he realises that words can take on the form of physical pain - like a snakebite, sharp and sudden and painful.

**38 SNOW**

“You know what they say about the first snow of the season,” Syuusuke says, hands outstretched to catch the snowflake, and you ask, “It’s lucky or something?”, not knowing much about what people say; “Or something,” Syuusuke replies, and even though half his face is covered by a scarf, you know he’s smiling.

**39 SOLID**

The silence is as solid as a wall that you wish you had the strength to punch down (who cares if your knuckles will bleed), the air thick and humid (you’re choking on it) – but you’re still happy because afternoons like this don’t come by often (at least he’s shooting glances your way too, like he’s bursting with things to say, and that’s enough).

**40 SPRING**

Spring break, in Syuusuke’s point of view, is never long enough; they will spend March talking about homework and school over lunch and tea – never really about themselves because March is never long enough – and by the time Syuusuke plucks up enough courage to ask Yuuta about themselves, April will have begun and Yuuta will have left him.

**41 STABLE**

“Come down now or you’ll fall,” Syuusuke calls from the ground, his voice wavering in the distance, but you hold your arms out and plant your feet as firmly as you can on the branch – precarious, but you balance yourself eventually in five seconds – he’s not going to catch you this time.

**42 STRANGE**

He tells you strange things every night before you go to bed, things that make you blush and hit him in mock outrage, things like “You’ll always be my precious little brother”, but you can’t help but squirm a bit when you think about how strange these strange things sound exactly.

**43 SUMMER**

Syuusuke spends his eighteenth summer at a seaside town in France, spends his days off the shore taking photographs and writing letters that he crumples and throws into the bin afterwards because all of them talk about himself too little and ask about Yuuta too much.

**44 TABOO**

“No,” you tell Syuusuke quietly, and he asks, whispers, his voice hardly audible, “Why not”, palms pressed hard against your chest, fingers placed over your maddeningly beating heart like a prayer, praying for your reply, but you know there is only one right answer to this one wrong question.

**45 UGLY**

“It’s ugly, isn’t it,” you muse, staring wistfully at your reflection’s forehead, and Syuusuke creeps an arm past your neck, lays his head on your shoulder ( _secretly you shiver_ ), “Those who tell you that,” – he traces the scar, and you hold your breath – “are blind”, and as you stare at both your faces in the mirror ( _alike, so very alike, you tell yourself_ ) you can’t help but wish he isn’t the only one thinking that.

**46 WAR**

There’s something about this that makes you sick, sick of the constant cold warring, sick of the quiet tension in his hand as it brushes against yours, the tension that asks _can we talk like we used to_ , and a little voice at the back of your head tells you you’re completely at fault – only you aren’t, you know you aren’t.

**47 WATER**

“Aren’t you worried I’ll kill give it too much water so it dies, or something,” you snap, but Syuusuke presses the miniature watering can into your hand and says, “I’m sure you’ll like him – his name is Yuuta, too”, and you snatch the can from him and turn away, fighting to suppress the amusement that’s steadily creeping its way onto your face.

**48 WELCOME**

“Why, Fuji-kun,” Mizuki drawls, twirling a bit of his hair round his finger (your insides clench in disgust), “I didn’t know you thought you were welcome here – ” but then Yuuta appears behind him, looking like he’s got a headache coming on, whispers a few words in Mizuki’s ear (your insides clench some more) so Mizuki finally gives it up, and you sigh in relief, not needing bad things to happen while visiting Yuuta.

**49 WINTER**

The frost crunches under your feet and the sound echoes for miles; you’ve been walking in circles for hours, asking him meaningless questions while he replies with meaningless answers – in a way he’s gotten what he’s always wanted, you think to yourself, your being equals, both shivering in the cold, both kicking up flurries of snow with your winter boots, both skimming the surface of something so deep you could drown in it.

**50 WOOD**

“Yuuta,” Syuusuke says, his hands on your shoulders, looking you in the eye, smiling like he always does, “Yuuta, you’re being silly again,” and leans in for a kiss you weren’t expecting at all, and your knees weaken – you couldn’t make a dent with an axe on a piece of wood if you wanted to.


End file.
